I wouldn't have thought there's much in it for a small home server. Given that 8.04 is an LTS version with over 4 years support left and that Debian release cycles are usually pretty long too you'll probably end up having to do an upgrade around the same time.

It really all comes down to what you want the server to do

if you want to add media centre type stuff then you might want to use something like mythubuntu instead of a standard server version

if you want an easy to use web interface with loads of stuff preinstalled for you then ebox is worth a look

if you want to learn how to do everything yourself then debian is the way forward

I'm using it for my fileserver at work, which also runs OCS Inventory-NG for keeping track of the computers I support. It's been Debian 3.1, then 4.0, then testing (when Vista SP1 broke Samba), and now 5.0.

The main difference is that Ubuntu is more bleeding edge, pulling in newer packages before they are deemed stable enough for the official Debain release. So you get newer features, but more bugs too. IMO the Ubuntu LTS releases are a pretty good compromise between the two...

axeman wrote:It does seem that QA is generally better in Debian, but I've all but given up because the development lifecycle in Debian is far too long to cope with how often major software applications release updates these days.

Which is why there is always the backports repository for stable, and more desktop-oriented uses can always use testing. I find testing to be nearly as up-to-date as Ubuntu, and more stable.

axeman wrote:For example, until now the "stable" version of Debian still contained Firefox 2.x.x.x

People who give examples like this are missing the point. RHEL is the same way. You realize RHEL was on Firefox 1.5 until the 5.2 release half a year ago? Again, on a server you want stability and not rolling upgrades. Who cares about browser and codec versions on a server?

axeman wrote:The number of developers contributing to Ubuntu now is orders of magnitude higher than in Debian, so it's completely possible that things get fixed much quicker in Ubuntu these days.

Uh, no. Orders of magnitude higher? You realize Debian releases for 11 official architectures? Ubuntu only releases for i386 and amd64 now (and before that they only had ppc and sparc in addition). And ~80% of Ubuntu's packages still come from Debian unmodified. Debian has > 2000 active developers maintaining packages. Does Ubuntu have 20k developers? According to launchpad, Ubuntu has 135 MOTU members, 106 contributing universe devels and 72 core technical board members (including 56 inactive). They can respond faster because their process and organization is different, but also because they have a lot less work to do since they leverage the work of Debian developers. They only have to focus a vastly smaller subset of packages on a few mainstream architectures. The rest is done for them, courtesy of Debian.